I don’t ever remember being a believer. Going to religious services on high holidays with my family when I was young always weirded me out. I remember looking at the congregation around me and thinking, “You can’t actually all believe all this nonsense written here?”
I guess I’m missing the god gene.
Just wanted to add that, when my grandfather went off to Europe during WWII, he believed in God – and by the time he got back, what he’d seen over there convinced him that, nope, there’s no higher power looking out for humanity.
From my first exposure to the Christian story I honestly believed it was an “Emperor’s New Clothing”, kind of situation. I was only a child, but I was still sort of waiting for the punch line. Even though we dressed and went to church each Sunday.
Thing was, it was a Latin mass back then. As a child I thought it was just us kids that couldn’t understand the words. The adults knew all the responses and that lead me to believe they really did understand. The day I learned they knew no more Latin than I, was a watershed moment for me. I couldn’t believe it. I kept repeating my question all the way home from church.
And when it finally sunk in, I knew I was done with Catholicism. For good.
(Also lost a fair bit of respect for adults that day. Didn’t know the language, but sat there pretending it meant something to them, and responding like trained seals! )
I was never religious – my mom’s a non-practicing Jew and my dad was raised Baptist but gradually became something like a deist. Neither pushed any religious belief on me. I attended an Episcopal private school, but the religious education was pretty low key and not pushy. During the weekly services I sometimes went up to get communion (wafer and wine) out of boredom and hunger – my friends would look aghast, and it took a while for me to realize that they saw this as disrespectful, so I stopped.
The only time I got kind of close to becoming religious was in high school in the mid 90s – all my friends (we lived in Little Rock, AR at the time) were part of this youth group called Young Life (a Christian youth group), and they invited me to come to a summer camp. So I went, and parts were lots of fun, but it also included brutal evangelizing sessions, in which we were all declared to be sinners far from God and in need of redemption. Brutal stuff that made most of us cry. At the end, they asked us to raise our hands if we were saved, and those of us who didn’t raise our hand (like me) were taken into another room for a softer sermonizing session. I was never very close to giving in, but it was probably the closest I ever got. Looking back, those sessions were highly inappropriate for kids, IMO – especially the idea of dividing us up based on whether we had accepted the teachings or not.
I’ve been non-religious ever since, and in the last ten years I haven’t shied away from the term “atheist”, where before I preferred “agnostic”. Now I say I’m both.
Parents were both Southern Baptists, so I was raised in that environment. Around age 10 I started asking questions that no one in the church wanted to try to answer, by age 13, I no longer believed in THAT version of God. Didn’t really put much effort into thinking about religion until Earth Science class in the 9th grade. Well, that did it. Science made sense. There was evidence. Science wanted you to question, to prove it right or wrong. Now, this, this made sense!
Never looked back. I’m now 52 and still love/am fascinated by science to this day. On my left wrist I have my version of a cross. It’s a pale blue circle. Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot
Never believed any of it. I’ve been to church twice I think. Both times with friends who were church goers and I was basically staying with them for the day so got dragged along. One of the friends had a Vicar for a father. You may be surprised to learn that although he was my best friend all through my school years, we never discussed religion. Despite the fact his dad was a Vicar I just assumed he didn’t believe that shit. It was only later that I realised I had no idea what he believed. This is often the way it is in New Zealand and Australia. Religion is a private matter and you can know someone quite well without having any idea of what their religious beliefs are.
I was born with it. And nobody has succeeded in making me “come to” an alternative conclusion.
But I remember the first person who tried. When I was 5, I lived next door to Donna, and we moved across town, and one day Donna and mer mother came to visit my mom. Donna was sitting in my backyard swing, and some turn of event led her to say “Jesus is watching us”. I’m like “Huh?” She pointed at the clear blue sky and said Jesus can see everything we do. Umm, OK. I fell for the “mayja look” ploy and saw nobody. but I was six, how dumb did she think I was?
I was raised in a Southern Baptist family and went to a Christian school. I struggled with it always, and tried hard to believe. I prayed, and got the same answering service as Trinopus. I had a lot of anxiety about hell.
As I got older, I sinned a lot more and even played at Satanism, and still no lightning bolts came. I resented fiercely being made to go to church. I was probably agnostic at this time.
Later still, when I had kids, I enrolled them in a Christian school because it seemed a lot nicer and smaller than the public school. I figured the Christianity would either roll off, or manifest itself more as the golden rule than “Jesus is Lord”. At home, I told them they should make up their own minds.
Finally, I wound up here and read a lot of discussions on the topic that really helped me. Some people would say I’ve swung too far to the other side. When I think about Christianity, it makes me really angry. I feel I was lied to, and the adults that told me these lies should have known better, because any idiot can see that there is no god! (This despite the time it took me to recognize it). All the fear and wasted time was for nothing. I am bitter.
Lifelong agnostic.
I was raised in a secular/non-religious family, and the subject of religion was pretty much never mentioned when I was growing up. Despite my upbringing I read the Bible from cover to cover in my early teens (mostly dull with some exciting bits in the OT and a few interesting ideas in the NT) and have been to church a fair amount as an adult (including about five years I was actually paid to go). While I’ve met all sorts of Christians and considered all sorts of religious ideas I remain firmly agnostic.
I had a moment of realization when I was 10 years old, and using a sharp-bladed shovel to whack down on a thick coat of ice covering my grandparents’ front walk - and managed to hit my big toe instead. The subsequent explosion of jargon ruined any chance I had at the Afterlife.
My father cured the equally painful buildup of blood under the toenail by briefly affixing the red-hot end of an unfolded paper clip* to the surface of the nail, thus creating an exit hole for the hemorrhagic fluid.
*For another, that might’ve seemed a metaphor for hell. :dubious:
My mother and grandparents were religious but never went to church. My grandparents did do a “bible study” on Wednesday nights but I was only there once or twice. My father never mentioned religion that I can remember. Religion was never really pushed on me except maybe a little social pressure to fit in with conversations among older relatives about religion occasionally. But after going through the whole series of televangelist scandals of the 1980s it became obvious to me that religion was simply made up by men, that there was absolutely no evidence of a higher power and that men would claim different things about god to meet their (good or bad) needs. I think religion is largely a positive “feel-good” force, but it just isn’t something I need.
1950s – Mom took us kids to church and Sunday school; Dad only came along on Xmas and Easter. I was either six or seven; we moved away from there before I turned eight.
Standing next to my mother in church one Sunday I looked around during one of those call & response things, I think they call it, and saw that peculiar religious fervor/trance expression on the face of a man near us. I pulled at Mom’s skirt and whispered “Mommy, these people really believe this stuff.” I had thought it was the same as Santa Claus, etc., something for little kids.
After that, she always asked me on Sundays whether I wanted to go to church; mostly I didn’t go … until the day the preacher’s son attacked me with a piece of rubber hose on my way home from school. I didn’t go at all after that.
I was never religious, but I kinda/sorta believed a little. I didn’t not believe. I cannot recall my parents ever going to church except for weddings and funerals. One set of grandparents were very religious, and as a child I occasionally went to church with them or with a school friend.
I did not believe in a global flood and did believe in evolution. Was only vaguely familiar with material from the Bible. Jesus was the son of God, but until high school I didn’t realize he was actually supposed to be the same being as God.
Became sort of mildly interested, and read the gospels - those were the important part, right? Read up on the contradictions in the gospels and the idea of Mark promoting adoptionism and how the ending wasn’t original. Read scholarly ideas on when they were written, etc. Learned about Q and the synoptic problem and the differences in the Synoptics and John. Determined there wasn’t a lot we could know.
But what got me was when I read about the scholarly consensus on the origins of Judiasm. There was nothing unique or miraculous about it. Just the henotheism -> monotheism shift. I read about the archaeological evidence, and I learned more of what was claimed in the OT overall. And I just realized “I don’t believe any of this.” None of the miracles, anyway. I never had, really, I just thought maybe there was some kernel of truth. Or social norms made me go that way (grew up in rural Alabama).
It’s funny, I was 29, when I actually had that thought and said I was an atheist. But I remember being 18 (shortly after HS graduation, dated by a specific event), and saying how certain aspects made no sense. You know, a lot of people say moral relativism comes out of non-belief, but I was the opposite then. My problem was God changing up the rules on what was moral. And I could never accept “God does it, so it’s morally right.” Back then I was like “right is right and wrong is wrong and if God does wrong, it’s still wrong”. But I just never thought much about it.
Anyway, while I don’t think researching the origins of Judaism made me a non-believer, it did lead me to acknowledge that I didn’t believe any of text (beyond what I’d believe from some culture worshiping other gods), and thus there was no more basis for believing in this particular deity than in all the others I didn’t believe in.
Around the same time I realised that the universe could not logically exist.
It was a process. Raised in a very fundamental subset of the Baptist (Free Will Baptist make southern Baptist look liberal). About the age of 8 I made an observation about dinosaurs being extinct for millions of years before man and the Bible said that all animals and man were created in the same week. I opined that one of them had to be wrong and was told “Never say the bible is wrong.” That was where it started and I had periods of time in my teens where I tried to believe - makes some things easier - but could never get to that point. I self identified as agnostic, as agnostic-who-is-atheist-for day-to-day-purposes, etc. If forced to take a label today I’d like nullifidian because it isn’t defined by NOT-something. But, I suspect I’d end up explaining that to most of the people I run into.
For me, it was around the time I was being confirmed (age 11-12, 1979-80-ish, Episcopalian, FWIW). It just seemed hokey and bogus to me, and then once I started thinking about it, the whole thing seemed hokey and bogus.
I always went to church and Sunday school as a youngster. You just did it. In Sunday School I was in the “Challenge” class up through about age 12. We actually had homework and wrote short reports. Personally I tried to find logical explanations for the miracles. I read all kinds of books attempting to explain, the flood, the calamities leading up to the exodus, Jesus’ miracles. This lead me to things like Velikovsky.
When I learned a little more science, that was obviously wrong. And so was the “science” of the Bible. As I went through Jr. High it also began to dawn on me, that people had good incentives to want me to continue to believe even if what they wanted me to believe was not true. We were not all in this together searching for the truth. I became much more skeptical.
I was raised Jewish (Reform). Around the age of 7-8, in Sunday school, we learned about monotheism, and how Jews believe in only one God. I raised my hand and asked the teacher “What if someday we discover that there are two Gods, or lots of Gods . . . or [horror] no God at all?” The teacher’s only reply was to repeat “Well, we believe in only one God.” I repeated my question, and she repeated her answer. That’s when I knew it was all bullshit.
I’ve been a doubter since an early age. I even remember the trigger event in Sunday school. The SS teacher pointed out the renderings of different religious figures around the room. I looked at them in turn and was stopped cold when I came to one that was blank and captioned “God”. In my young mind, I equated God=nothing, and while I wondered about it, I never asked the teacher to explain it.
Other than a few random church-goings, we did not attend regularly, and from about the age of eight or so, never attended again. Since religion was not a part of daily life, I never considered it while growing up, and was mostly relieved that I wasn’t Catholic and having to attend all those bizarre things like catechism that my friends had to go to.
I ended up marrying a catholic woman who was pretty immersed in her faith. I guess she married me thinking that I’d convert. While I attended mass with her for a long time, I never considered conversion and pretty much thought the whole rigmarole of the mass to be superstitious nonsense. I attended with her to show parental unity for the kids (all of whom have since walked away from the church).
My present wife is a totally lapsed catholic who has nothing but contempt for the church. I’ve gone from agnostic to a modified atheist. By that I mean I am not a lunatic about it. When somebody says “god bless you” for doing some charitable act, I just smile and go on about my business rather than making a big deal about being a non-believer. It makes them feel good, but it does nothing for me.
It was a gradual process.
I grew up in a religious household. Pentacostal. My parents lived and breathed church. They expected their children to have a similar bent.
So it was difficult for me NOT to believe at least a little bit, as a kid. I accepted God and Jesus just as easily as I accepted Santa and the Easter Bunny.
As I grew older, questions started popping up that no one could give satisfactory answers to. So I kept them to myself. I didn’t know that these questions were the first signs of doubt. Instead, I just figured that answers would eventually come as I got older.
College was when I first started experiencing something akin to existential angst. The anxieties that college kids normally drown out with alcohol and wild sex were kind of festering in me. I’d take long exhausting walks around town, waiting for that quiet voice to speak to me and assure me everything would be okay. I never heard it. But I’d keep walking and walkng, trying to feel that peace that everyone said I was supposed to feel. And I prayed a lot. It helped me feel better, but intellectually I knew it was purely psychological.
Some time in my mid to late 20s, while I was doing my post-doc, I realized that it was okay to stop calling myself a Christian. I don’t think there was any one thing that did it. I think it was an accumulation of little things. Like, I was working with this guy named Chuck. A really nice, smart guy. But he’d just become born-again, and it was all he could talk about. While we’d be working in our shared office, we’d have these long but interesting conversations about a variety of topics. But when we’d talk about religion, I realized that I just didn’t care as much as he did. And I also hated how stupid he sounded when he’d talk about it. I’d always want to change the subject so that he would go back to sounding like the intelligent guy I knew he was.
Then there was the time I went to a party with a bunch of other scientists. Chuck was there, and he and another guy were having a heated back-and-forth about the existence of God. It quickly became a pile-on–with almost everyone in the room disagreeing with Chuck. As much as it pained me to watch Chuck be ganged up on, it was clear to me that his opponents had better arguments.
But some part of me still wanted to cling to something. To believe in something. So as I approached 30, I gave one last stab at religion by attending a Quaker congregation. I tried for a whole year to wait for the “inner light” to work its magic on me. But nada. I realized it was okay to stop pretending, since I really had given it my hardest effort.
I “came out” to my family as an agnostic shortly afterwards. Almost ten years later, I haven’t changed my mind. And I’m a lot happier now. It’s funny, but problems don’t seem so daunting to me anymore. Instead of having to wait for supernatural intervention, I just use my noggin.